Overview
Leos Janacek (1854-1928), who wrote such highly acclaimed operas as The Cunning Little Vixen, Jenufa, and Katya Kabanova, as well as choral, chamber, and orchestral pieces, was one of the most original, complex, and appealing artists of the twentieth century. Inspired by the rhythmical and melodic strains of Czech speech patterns and Moravian folk songs, Janacek used unconventional composition principles to create a new musical style that blends tremendous energy and lyricism, passion and tenderness. His music continues to enchant listeners, and his operas, in particular, address universal human emotions and moods that remain strikingly relevant for today's audiences.
While Janacek's works are performed frequently on stages around the world, little is known about the composer himself. In this biography, the first to appear in English in over two decades, Mirka Zemanova draws on previously unavailable Czech-language sources, memoirs, and letters, including Janacek's intimate correspondence with Kamila Stoesslova, his great love and sometimes reluctant muse. Zemanova depicts a shy, lonely, moody, and self-doubting man with a fiery temper and an intensely independent and proud spirit. She also reveals a man who glorified women in his operas but treated them cruelly in his own life.
The author tells the fascinating story of an isolated artist who was virtually unknown outside of his native Moravia until his early sixties, when the triumphant Prague premiere of Jenufa brought Janacek international fame. She sheds light on the creative surge in his final years, attributing his remarkable late flowering to the success in Prague, his fierce patriotic pride in the newly independent Czechoslovakia at the end of World War I, and, perhaps most of all, his passionate attachment to Kamila Stoesslova. From the time they met, when Janacek was sixty-three and she was twenty-five, to his death eleven years later, Kamila held the composer under her spell and inspired many of his late works. Zemanova also thoroughly chronicles Janacek's ardent courtship of and tempestuous marriage to Zdenka Schulz, his extramarital love affairs and infatuations, and the tragic deaths of his two children.
Synopsis
A compelling portrait of this enigmatic musical genius within the context of the cultural and political currents of his time.
Publishers Weekly
Czech composer Leos Janacek (1854-1928), unlike such prodigies as Mozart and Schubert, came into his own, creatively, very late in what was until then a quite unremarkable life, lived way off the musical map in provincial Moravia. He married a young piano pupil while he was still struggling to make ends meet, and although it seemed she never really understood the nature of his genius, he remained tied to her for life a source of considerable conflict when he fell in love with Kamila Stosslova, a woman nearly 40 years younger, in his early 60s. It was this improbable affair (which seems to have been entirely platonic) that inspired most of the work by which Jan cek continues to be best known: all the operas after Jenufa his first great success the Sinfonietta, the Glagolithic Mass and the passionately emotional string quartets. Zemanova, a Czech-born musicologist based in London, has done an admirable job of elucidating this odd relationship, relying on newly available translations of some of the correspondence between the pair, and her account of the works, particularly some of the earlier and lesser-known ones, is solidly satisfying. Above all, she has delivered an empathetic and even-handed account of a decidedly prickly but remarkable personality, one who achieved world recognition by dint of dogged determination, and a fixed belief in his own unique approach to music as a sort of heightened speech. Illus. not seen by PW. (Sept. 16). Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.